The Joy of Six: Kevin De Bruyne at Manchester City

The great passers play passes only they can see. Very occasionally Kevin De Bruyne would go one step further: playing passes even he couldn’t see. Take his little slip-and-slide against Stoke at home in October 2017. It wasn’t even his most celebrated pass against Stoke at home in October 2017. But for me it’s the ultimate De Bruyne pass.

Leroy Sané is on the left wing, facing towards his own goal. He lays the ball back to De Bruyne on the corner of the penalty area. De Bruyne shapes to cross, but at the last minute he slips the ball into the left channel for Sané, who has doubled back on himself and is sprinting towards the left byline. Sané crosses; Raheem Sterling scores. In one of the tightest areas on the pitch, De Bruyne’s disguised pass has taken out five Stoke players.

The issue: De Bruyne has his back to Sané as he plays the ball. He can’t possibly have seen the run. He can’t have known he was there. So how did he know? Was it intuition? Had they rehearsed the move in advance? Was it a punt? Was it blind luck? The genius of De Bruyne was that you were never quite sure. Great athletes generate not just awe, but disbelief: the “what” is stunning enough, but the beauty somehow lies in the “how”. And to watch De Bruyne at his best was to glimpse the point at which sport lapses into something close to pure magic. JL

Writing a colour sidebar on a football match? That’s the hardest job in the world. Who thinks of the colour sidebar writer, furiously tapping out a themed on-the-whistle take, striving to make it considered and comprehensive when the whole thing can be trashed by a late goal, a VAR shemozzle or Roy Keane saying stuff on TV?

The answer, of course, is nobody thinks of the colour sidebar writer. And rightly so. They are scum. Not to mention biased against all teams everywhere simultaneously. And likely to make a short appreciation of Kevin De Bruyne’s footballing genius all about themselves.

But De Bruyne was also vital in this very niche field, a relentless curator of big moments and a gift from the gods for the analyst, pundit and sidebar-minion. In part this is because his peak years coincided with the triumph of systems football, of managed attacking patterns, a dearth of random elements of skill. You can still analyse systems. But how much more fun to have the option of describing moments of unchoreographed self-expression.

It is a key marker of De Bruyne’s quality that he was able to do this while playing for the greatest system team of the age. This was his real point of difference, a creative player with the brain and discipline to exist both inside and outside this nexus. He made City win. He also made the game surprising, visceral and emotionally engaging.

Of his many roles at City my own favourite was midfield ball-carrier, that rare Gerrard-like freedom to bomb on and shoot, dribble and do stuff off the cuff. The goal against Chelsea at the Etihad in January 2022 was a perfect example.

It was a dull, stifling game with no space, just endless passing and pressing. Right up until the 70th minute when De Bruyne saw grass in front of him, bumped away N’Golo Kanté, adjusted his feet mid-stride and eased a low curling shot into the far corner. The goal gave City a 13-point lead at the top of the table. It also provided that vital note of life, human light and something to actually write about.

This was targeted freedom, the classic bomb-forward deployed like a stealth weapon. And half an hour after the final whistle De Bruyne appeared again, kicking a ball around with his kids in front of the empty stands, still quietly doing his thing, out there humanising the project. BR

Two-footed players are vanishingly rare and rarer still at Manchester City, though we did arguably boast a few no-footed players in the bad old days, as anyone who saw Ged Brannan or Michael Frontzeck play can attest.

Which makes Kevin De Bruyne – the definitive two-footed player of his generation – all the more of a unicorn. De Bruyne’s left peg can do just about everything his right can: the no-backlift curler, the sly disguised pass, the palm-stinging blooter. Try to force him on to his “weaker” side, and you’ll probably see him wheeling away in celebration a few seconds later.

Unquestionably the apex for De Bruyne’s two-footedness came in the 5-1 win away at Wolves in May 2022, almost certainly the greatest performance I’ve seen by a City player in the flesh. City arrived at Molineux still stinging from the bruising and fairly farcical Champions League knockout defeat by Real Madrid the week before, and in the middle of one of those grinding, relentless title races with Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool. Molineux had been cemented as a “tough place to go” in the minds of City fans thanks to a notorious 3-2 loss there in 2019, after City had been two up, and before kick-off the away end bristled with a scratchy nervous energy.

Not a bit of that for De Bruyne though, who – despite what his permanently flushed cheeks might lead you to believe – has ice churning through his veins. In 17 first-half minutes he had settled the game with a hat-trick of clean, ruthless efficiency: the first goal firmly arced past José Sa after a quick break; the second rifled into the top of the net following a blocked shot from Raheem Sterling that De Bruyne, naturally, had set up; and the third – the best of the lot – one of those crisp, still rising drives that he routinely delivers almost with a shrug.

It wasn’t until reading match reports on the train home that I realised all three goals were scored with his left foot, so effortless they had seemed. In the second half he bashed home a fourth with his right, almost as if to remind everyone that he can also do it on his stronger foot. Some performance, some player. Us City fans don’t know how lucky we’ve been to watch him this past decade. GM

No matter how talented, individualistic players have had to adapt to survive in Pep Guardiola’s teams. From Jack Grealish to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the manager has occasionally invested in expensive parts that have not fitted the machine.

Yet there are exceptions, of course: Guardiola was blessed to have Lionel Messi at Barcelona, trusted to operate in a strict but successful tactical system, with the talent to win the game by himself should it be required. Kevin De Bruyne took the same role for Guardiola’s City. One of his greatest displays of individual will and skill came against Arsenal in April 2023.

City’s two meetings with their challengers that season felt like heavyweight title bouts; the first, at the Emirates Stadium in February, featured both sides landing early blows before the champions unpicked their opponents’ defences. This was the rematch, and with Arsenal top but faltering, City – and especially De Bruyne – came barrelling out of their corner.

The first goal was created by the Belgian running straight at a backpedalling defensive line, exchanging passes with Erling Haaland and firing into the bottom corner. Seven minutes in, Arsenal had been dunked on. The double act continued, Haaland – who has broken the mould by delivering for Guardiola without surrendering his swagger – very much the Scottie Pippen to De Bruyne’s Michael Jordan. Usually it was the other way round, but De Bruyne led the charge in that game, crossing for a marginally onside John Stones to head home just before the break.

De Bruyne combined with Haaland again in the second half, slotting home in almost dismissive fashion. The Norwegian would get his goal in stoppage time having already let his hair down, by which point De Bruyne was on the bench, his work done and the writing on the wall in the title race. Not just the central cog in a relentless machine, at his peak De Bruyne could also step out of that role and put the team on his back. In this century, you could probably count the players capable of such duality on one hand, maybe two. Guardiola has a hell of a job on his hands to replace him. NM

I always imagine Kevin De Bruyne asking himself the same question. In the blink of an eye. As his mind races through the options. How can he make life as excruciatingly unpleasant for the defender as possible? When he whips in those flat right-footed crosses for his teammate at the far post, it is not just about locating the corridor of deepest uncertainty. It is down to the detail of where the ball will bounce, how he can most savagely turn the defender around, tie him in a knot.

When he measures those penetrating through balls, it is to offer his opponent an illusion. Of course you can cut that out. Oh, wait. When he surges forward in possession, the directness is almost insulting. His movement off the ball, the ability to sniff out the most dangerous spaces, is similarly unsettling.

De Bruyne’s performance at Luton in the FA Cup fifth round in February 2024 was a career highlight, the only time that he has supplied four assists in one game. The weird thing was that his name did not make the banner headlines. Blame Erling Haaland, who finished a 6-2 win with five goals, for that. De Bruyne teed him up for the first four.

There is something about Kenilworth Road for a midweek game under the lights; the walk there through the tight street builds it up brilliantly. It is the authenticity, the complete lack of pretension. The old place hummed with anticipation because Luton had given everyone a game here in their debut Premier League season. Could they shock City to reach the FA Cup quarter-finals for the first time in 30 years?

There was a split-second in the third minute when they realised De Bruyne was in no mood for romance and it was a sound, as much as anything else; a great, collective intake of breath as the Luton midfielder Jordan Clark slipped and De Bruyne was in to cross low for Haaland.

Clark’s error did not happen in a vacuum. De Bruyne had unnerved him with a run on his blindside. From there, it was a demonstration of De Bruyne’s remorselessness, his cruelty. The pass for the second from halfway was the highlight. When Haaland made his run, he was practically wrestling with his marker, Teden Mengi. So how did De Bruyne thread the ball between them? DH

Two images of Kevin De Bruyne will linger in the imagination after a majestic 10 years at Manchester City featuring 19 trophies. In the first, the regal Belgian glides left to right along an inside-right channel, past the media seats at the Etihad, the ball at his boots, the blue wave of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City all around. Then, with a glance up, or maybe no need for one thanks to his preternatural second sight, his right foot swishes through the ball and sends over a curving cross/pass hybrid that eliminates the opposition and finds a teammate with geometric precision.

The mesmeric sequence has been witnessed countless times. De Bruyne’s response to his own wizardry is usually a shrugged nonchalance, a sense of so-what, what-else-do-you-expect? Because, after all, this is me, the boy from Drongen touched by genius.

The second lasting memory is of De Bruyne speaking, perhaps when fielding a question about the latest Champions League encounter with Real Madrid, his relationship with Guardiola or family life, and the manner of the response. This often came with a cocked brow and a laconic air, plus an unnerving sense of bemusement, a quizzical disbelief at why anyone would need to know Guardiola’s management style, Madrid’s ability to engineer late comebacks or whether his children understand how celebrated he is.

There is often humour, too, a twinkle in the eye, a wry grin, the same sense of fun with which he plays a sport which is supposed to be tough at the elite level. But De Bruyne has always appeared to be operating on a different plane to the rest. JJ